I’m a language learning liar and a cheat. A WaniKani HERETIC even
I barely have any time at all nowadays ever since I saw the Neurolinks presentation which shifted my priorities to 99% neuroscience and 1% don’t die endeavors - you know, the expensive hobbies some people call sleeping and eating.
I still want to finish WaniKani in a year yet I have but 30 minutes a day to do so.
The solution: cheating. Lots of it. Scratch that - all the cheating.
I would normally brace for the impact of a huge flame war, but the WaniKani community is the polar opposite of a YouTube comment section.
It will likely just bombard me with more constructive feedback and encouragement - which is fantastic for my update piece on how to learn Japanese later.
Without further ado, here is the black magic piece:
The Article.
(Warning: Contains Significant levels of WK heresy)
My level at the time of posting this thread: 17
(Sep 2, 2020)
Most people I’ve seen that went maximum speed and reached level 60 thanks to “cheating” ended up resetting to level 1. That’s not a 80/20 principle like you mentioned in the article.
History tells “cheating” is not a good option, better to do it properly.
Yeah, really missed the sanctimonious griping about learning things properly. (Not.)
Long-term use isn’t a good idea, sure, but if you can pass a level in a week and a half it cuts down the time spent SIGNIFICANTLY.
If you really didn’t learn the item, you can resurrect it. Or dismiss it. Or deliberately fail it. Or move on with your life and still get the bulk of your learning Japanese done using other sources. If you struggle with some vocab or kanji on this site, it’s no skin off your nose. You may learn it eventually, or you may not.
Looks like I’ve actually used most of the scripts you suggested, but with the addition of some more “similar kanji” scripts and a couple of other random ones. I don’t remember what all of them do. There might be a more efficient set-up.
Inefficient cheating.
For Ultimate reorder script, you should click on the scale and set it to タイプ (type) so all the radical and kanji come first, instead of clicking again and again on ‘force reorder’
… Sometimes I wonder how many people miss the レベル and タイプ of reorder script because it’s writing in katakana…
In other words “how do I learn Japanese without putting any time to learn Japanese.” This seems like pretty good material for r/languagelearningjerk.
You have to come to terms that Japanese takes about 3000-4800 hours to even pass the N1 (see: basically C1 level in the European language framework, still not C2). At 30 minutes a day, you will get to the lower bound of that in 20 years. And I’m not sure cheating will be the most effective learning tool.
I’ll admit that cheating in specific instances can be not the worst thing (ie: radicals, or a small number of Kanji not yet gurued, since the former isn’t too important, and the latter can be learned through the following vocab lesson), but this is pretty terrible as a general rule.
Haha I knew these kind of answers would come. I honestly feel like I retain more now that I have less to remember, laser focus! Well, for me at least. I get that the vocabulary is meant to enforce and you are supposed to also learn grammar and what not, but I wouldn’t still be on track if it wasn’t for tricks and gained many other benefits as I mentioned at the bottom of the article in the conclusion section.
One isn’t done after level 60 either way. There is lots of burning and other things to do.
5 times 5 minutes can be better than an hour. Not to mention: we don’t all work the same.
I’ve seen many people restart because they feel overhelmed, but I feel quite the opposite. I used to feel that way before I started cheating and reading easy texts with new symbols in them I just recently learned I noticed it still works for me given that I understood them and had almost no other learning after starting to cheat.
Bonus: How mad will everyone be if the heretic of all people does well with his stupid approaches that don’t work and only waste time?
As for the time management, life definitely tends to get in the way sometimes.
I agree with what @MegaZeroX has mentioned, e.g. it’s okay to let a few radicals or to-be-gurued kanji slip by.
However, cheating big time on most reviews is only going to make it more painful later on.
What I said boiled down to “If you can’t complete WK the right way due to a lack of time, cheating your way through won’t solve the core issue that you apparently don’t have the time to learn Japanese.” I don’t see you “posting” that anywhere.
